The Game
It was quite flattering to get an invitation to The Game - but playing for almost all of my bankroll against some of the best players in the world wasn't for me, so I turned the offer down.
For the third year in a row, Sweden's
Channel 5 hosts the
Scandinavian Masters competition. In previous years, the format has been the usual sit-and-go tournaments, but this time it'll be a hybrid format, a mixture of tournament and cash game. Nordic players have qualified through PartyPoker to a final table in London, which will have two winners. They get $50,000 with which to play a cash game with, amongst others, Patrik Antonius (Finland), Martin de Knijff (Sweden), and Jan Sorensen (Denmark). There also will be added international excitement in the forms of Tony G and Dave "Devil Fish" Ulliott playing.
The cash-game blinds will be $100-$200 with a $25 ante and $50,000 buy-in. Players get to rebuy anytime they get below $50,000, and the Internet qualifiers get to keep every cent they've got left when the week is over. I wonder how many big pots these players will get involved in … I'm guessing not too many. They should be able to lose $20,000-$30,000 in blinds and antes and still get home with a nice win.
In either case, it's going to be a lot of fun to watch on TV once filming has ended. I don't think it'll be as dramatic as the American show
High Stakes Poker, where the players can enter with any amount of money, but deep-stack cash games are always fun to watch.
ATG Sues Unibet
ATG is suing Unibet, demanding €25 million for an alleged information theft from one of ATG's databases. The company is owned partially by the Swedish state and has a monopoly on horse betting in Sweden. To administer all of this, it gathers all essential information in a database called Sportdatabasen (literally, "the sports database"), and now, ATG has decided to sue the bookmaker/poker site Unibet for illegal use of the information provided in the database. The lawsuit covers database intrusion. ATG argues that Unibet based all of its horse-related gambling activity on the data since 2000, despite having been issued several warnings.
ATG claims that earlier court cases in Swedish and European courts have shown the same, and demands - apart from the €25 million - that Unibet destroy all illegally gathered data. The money is supposed to be a retroactive license fee on roughly 10 percent of Unibet's gross revenue for the last seven years.
State Investigation
The Swedish state has launched a new investigation concerning its gambling politics and regulation. As usual, there's a lot of nonsense and many clichés involved, but one sentence is interesting: The investigator is to especially consider whether people should be able to hold live poker tournaments without seeking permission to do so, or possibly be able to arrange them after seeking permission, assuming that the arrangers don't gain anything economically. Also, the buy-ins and winnings have to be low enough to classify the tournaments as amusement. Finally, someone in Sweden has understood that the Friday night poker session at the local club isn't that dangerous after all.
European Poker Tour
The
European Poker Tour schedule has been set, and, as usual, the Copenhagen event will be held in late February. I'll start the bragging already by claiming that of the nine tournaments (no, I'm not counting the
PokerStars Caribbean Adventure as European, regardless of what the sponsor claims!), at least four will have a winner from a Nordic country this season. Two tournaments will be won by non-Europeans, one by an Irishman, and one by a Briton. That leaves one remaining spot for the rest of Europe - good luck! I'll have the honor of playing three events for Team Martinspoker (Barcelona, London, and Copenhagen), so I guess we'll see each other at the green tables!
Ola Brandborn is a blogger and writer for poker.se.
